Indelible Impression Acacia Cochise

He always says goodbye the same way, “ even though there was tragedy in our disconnection, thank you for changing my life”

She wonders, “what do I get out of this, when my love of you only gifts me grief and loneliness?”

It began here:

In the ritual of our riddle, I lingered too long in inadequacies in order to become an antidote to your fears and reduced myself to asking simple questions so I could work the easiest pieces of my experience into yours

I played pretend in houses that were not mine and found the trick of how to excel in schools that resembled my father’s prison The key is, start behaving like an inmate It’s also the trap

You thought that because you disinterred me from deep within the earth, and marked me on the map with a headstone carved with black lines

You’d be able to hold me

You called me mother, child, teacher, lover and then thief when I refused your fantasy

You made boundaries and marked me, named be, but also gave me anonymity: Black Girl, Brown Girl, Woman of Colour, Exotic and BIPoC–do you really know who you left behind?

I had to make deals with my body, trade my eloquence for brute struggle, and transmute my intimacy into fodder for the republic. You denied me entry into the smallest spaces, pronouncing, “my child, there is no place for you”.

I am a child no more. And even when I was one, I was never your child, just an infantilization of your fear of the other.

You accused me of anger, and you weren’t wrong, just predictable in the way you reacted to your own displacement when you found out we lead different lies. In your life, there were places

I couldn’t go, and there were spaces

I wouldn’t take you

Because of how and why we ‘saw’ each other;

Every day I mourn the lives of those unexplored characters as the silent narrator, Living with the history beside the possibilities, Now you too know the things I’ve always known. The absence of sound and being ‘less’.

Newfound understanding released you, and isolated me. I love you, and you only saw me because I showed you how to look.

It ends here:

Every day I leave a flower for us upon the grave of what we could have never understood alone but whose reflection we managed to glimpse over and over in our liminal, elemental reality

I am the words that unmake and remake myself: I am not alone. I am learning and unlearning as part of a much bigger wholeness, the mystery of a deeper love. “I am my own indelible impression; and I will not forget.”

These are the words that have set me free, by those who came before and those that will come after me.